In spite of his disavowal of Freudian psychoanalysis as a model for understanding what are among the most horrible of the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps, systematic murder by those trained and committed to heal, Lifton's probing of these events take us closer to the life/death dance that Freud found to be the essence of human existence. He suggests that the Nazi phenomenon could not have occurred without the concepts of “volk” and “the Thousand Year Reich” that promoted a vision of invulnerability and of death conquered through the everlasting union of a people with a transcendental essence. Death was reserved for those outside this union.

Thus, it is inadequate to explain Auschwitz from the point of view of sadism and the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt does in Eichmann in Jerusalem, or in terms of the faceless, detached bureaucracy first described by Max Weber and applied by others to the